Encinitas parents bent out of shape over yoga on campus

The first instinct is to dismiss the parents as yahoos who don’t know the difference between yoga and yogurt.

But the second instinct, usually the better angel, is to try to understand what’s going on here.

A group of families, maybe 40 altogether, is raising Cain with the Encinitas Union School District over free twice-a-week yoga sessions. Fired up by a local pastor and counseled by an Escondido lawyer, they believe yoga on campus amounts to spiritual indoctrination, a violation of their religious freedom.

In time for Halloween, the culture war is back with a full spinal twist.

In the early ’90s, you may recall, North County school districts were inundated with breathless reports that teachers were exposing innocent children to “dark” books, R-rated movies and witchcraft.

Yoga, it seems, is the latest variation on the oft-repeated theme that Christian values are being undermined by “multicultural” public schools.

Look, it’s not news that Christians, from Baptists to Catholics, hear a few Sanskrit words and conclude that yoga is a Hindu religious practice. Or worse.

Two years ago, a southern Baptist minister set off a national firestorm when he preached that yoga is paganism, pure and simple.

Last year, the Salvation Army community center in Rolando risibly renamed its yoga classes “stretch and tone” to cleanse them of mystical overtones.

As Juliet (dressed in Lululemon) might say, Would a pose by any other name feel as sweet?

The simple truth for all us dummies is this: Hinduism is a religion; yoga is a body-based philosophy (or ancient science, if you will) that predates Hinduism.

Where do I get this?

Straight from Larry Payne, the L.A.-based co-author of “Yoga for Dummies” who, it turns out, also trained my wife to be a yoga instructor.

Payne tells me that a few atheists come to his classes.

If yoga really were Hindu in nature, wouldn’t these students be offended?

Appears not.

I sometimes exchange greetings with the Christian and Jewish women who practice yoga at my wife’s studio and, so far as I know, not one has been tempted to convert to Hinduism.

The mainstream cultural view of yoga as a secular exercise does not mean the Encinitas district has no obligation to monitor the program, funded by a half-million-dollar grant from the Encinitas-based Jois Foundation.

The district selected the nine instructors, Superintendent Tim Baird tells me, and developed the curriculum. It’s working with the University of San Diego and the University of Virginia to measure the new program’s effectiveness.

Public education is always being asked to strive higher. Well, this is an example of stretching the stiff status quo.

No question, Ashtanga yoga, the style adopted by the Jois Foundation — the billionaire backers of which were featured in an April Vanity Fair article — can be challenging for aging joints.

I know this from humbling experience. Old tennis players are about as flexible as the Tin Man after a heavy rain.

However, for the mass of naturally lithe kids, many of whom live lives of noisy desperation, yoga is a quiet gift, a discipline that is as much of a threat to religious faith as Chinese acupuncture. Or Indian curry.